 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories news and innovation coming to you from leaders in global connectivity and digital infrastructure. I'm Barb Mitchell and I'm pleased to be joined here today with Yasutaka Mizu, Global CMO of Colt Technology. What a pleasure to have you. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And I'm really pleased to go through the session with you. Absolutely. I'm so excited. And you, I know, have a session. I think you're focusing on a lot of your conversation right now is around preparing for AI, preparing for that AI revolution, we should say. And so, can you just, let's start there if you don't mind, dive right in to the good stuff. A lot of people are talking about this, but can you just give us some what you may focus on for that conversation? Are we ready for AI? And so are we? I guess is the question. Yeah. It was one of our key questions which was brought up in a panel discussion we had earlier today. And I basically answered that question by saying a massive yes, because we don't even realize, but for example, Microsoft is going to introduce co-pilot on their Microsoft Azure and also Microsoft 365 from November. So a lot of companies and also a lot of individuals will start using AI functions along with the business applications. And we can't really tell which part is actually done by AI and which part is actually done by human as well. So whether or not we are ready, we will have to go and cope with that as well. And I think we call technology services have been using AI and machine learning from quite some time ago. And we actually introduced it about three years ago in order to understand our customers by leveraging the technology as well. Interesting. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, I think so many people now are sitting back, some a little scared, I think, and some, you know, just curious, you know, about what the future holds. But as you said, and we were chatting earlier, I mean, you've been leveraging tools for AI for quite some time now. And so what plans do you have to continue that to to aid your business, but others, your partners and customers? Right, yeah, it's actually embedded quite heavily in our business already. So day to day operation is based on a lot of machine learning technology that we've already deployed. So we used machine learning technology to understand the intent of the customers. So we roughly can understand what customers are interested in. So before even we engage with the customers, we can have preconception of what they may be interested in, which actually helped to boost the pipeline by 120% as well. So it's just one of the examples. But if we use the AI in the right direction, we can actually not only boost the productivity, but also boost the customer experience and their satisfaction overall as well. Yeah, so interesting. I mean, the applications are endless, aren't they? And can be used in such a powerful way. So that's great. Thanks for that bit of insight there on how you're already doing that. And so, but outside of the world of AI, lots happens, I think, all the time with with Colt, but tell us about this week's announcement. Right, so I'm really excited to talk through this because it came out yesterday and we expanded our network in France, especially in three cities in France. We already had coverage in Paris and Lyon and some other areas as well. But we extended our coverage into Bordeaux, into Toulouse and to Lille as well. And we are basically covering most of the major cities across France and also are connecting those cities to the rest of the world as well. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, that's great to see that news come out. And it's like I said, it's always good. There's always, it feels like something happening. And on that note, your role, you're leading global marketing for Colt as CMO. And so I'm sure you're already starting to think about your plans going into 2024. Is there anything you might be able to give us a little sneak peek into sort of what's in store? Absolutely. I think we are going to double down on the use of the science-based sort of understanding of our customers and our business. We've already built our data lake and we started to apply AI and machine learning technology to even understand our customers better. We actually introduced this during the COVID, right? So we were able to tell which customers are needing more bandwidth. And also we were able to tell which customers are sort of struggling in that situation as well. So we have been able to offer flexible payment services in a proactive way. And after going through the pandemic, they actually ramped up their business again to probably better than where they used to be. And they are now coming back to us to tell us that we were the only company that helped them in a proactive way whilst they were having a hard time as well. So it really depends how we apply AI to make our business better. Probably one of the really interesting applications of AI is really to build intent-based network, which means we can choose to connect certain destinations by choosing a specific path. For example, a greener path where CO2 consumption is lower in specific countries or areas as well. So we've started to look into that with the rest of the company as well. And it's not something that we can do it just on ourself. So we are working with other partners to really build this together so that we can make this a better world that we can live as well. Yeah, that's amazing to hear. And I completely agree. It's the global ecosystem of partners and people working together towards a future that we all want to share. So thank you for that. And it feels like it's been a long first day, but it is still the first day. And so what are you most looking forward to for the remainder of the show this week? Absolutely, the partnering opportunities across all over the world. We see customers and partners from completely different parts of the world. I think the number of international travelers have increased this year. So I'm really hoping to interact with many of those people from different parts of the world so that we can start building partnership and strengthen it with the existing partners as well. Yeah, fantastic. And so for anyone while you're still at the show, is there a way that people can connect with you and your team? And then, you know, after capacity Europe is over and everyone's gone back to their respective homes, how can they find you? Yeah, we have a room upstairs and you can find it from the app, which is really useful as well. And you can actually get to choose who you want to meet within Colt as well. We have more than 50 sort of representatives from us as well. So you can choose anybody, including myself and just book our time so that we can meet and start discussion as well. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Mizu. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate your time and your insights here today. My pleasure. Thank you for helping me. Of course. Yeah, thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in again to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Until next time, happy networking.